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You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!

John Taylor Gatto

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John Taylor Gatto
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: December 15
Died: 2018
Died: October 25
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Teacher
Writer
Mon City
Need
Needs
Explorations
Algebra
Exploration
Adventure
Experience

More quotes by John Taylor Gatto

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It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for 'basic skills' practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.
John Taylor Gatto
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God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription-there was none that anyone had been able to find in over a century and a half-but because the political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is.
John Taylor Gatto
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It's been a horrifying academic secret for decades that the children who walk away with the highest formal honors, the valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, have a horrendous performance record in later life.
John Taylor Gatto
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Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
John Taylor Gatto
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Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.
John Taylor Gatto
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The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of it isn't real.
John Taylor Gatto
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Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
John Taylor Gatto
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Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.
John Taylor Gatto
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Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
John Taylor Gatto
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What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.
John Taylor Gatto
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Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
John Taylor Gatto
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Children do not learn in school they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.
John Taylor Gatto
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Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence
John Taylor Gatto
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Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.
John Taylor Gatto
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Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
John Taylor Gatto
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I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.
John Taylor Gatto
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You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill.
John Taylor Gatto
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I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.
John Taylor Gatto
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The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.
John Taylor Gatto
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Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
John Taylor Gatto